New Year's Eve is my favorite holiday, because it is the most mundane thing that could ever happen, yet it happens to all of us, great and small- can't stop time, gotta move along, turn the page. What I especially like is the bookmark it affords: a stopping place to look back at the way we thought things were just a short while ago. The Golden Oldie diary got me started thinking maybe I'd just share the rest of my
Top Ten ways the media has not covered the history leading to our possible war, something I wrote in late Feb-early March of 2003. Five years later, it was #5 that inspired me to dig this out today, but number ten is still my starting point to explain why I think what I think. For a trip down memory lane, skip over the fold if you please.

"When I first started... people said, 'You know, you're- you're twenty years old, what do you know? and you're running against the machine. Forget it.'  Well, you know, they were right the first time along. And I came back, two years later, and I won an election- everyone said, "you could never beat the ward's machine..." ...A lot of my closest friends told me that... ... But one of the secrets that I found out about life, about standing up for thing you believe in, is that you if surround yourself with people, who have a common vision, you can, sometimes, achieve outcomes, that others would never be able to achieve...

These are the words of Representative Dennis Kucinich, as transcribed by me, from my digital movie of the event, last Tuesday night in Keene, NH, 1/3/08. Just in case the media didn't happen to bring you his speech...
Join me below, to begin at the beginning.

    As a long-time Kucinich supporter, I've been looking for a place to use that line! And I am so glad to see that finally the climate conditions are becoming more favorable towards The Honorable Mr. K.
    I, too, am nerd enough to actually own more than one pocket Constitution at any given time, so that I will always have one to share. I also collect discarded books from libraries and at used book sales, because I was raised under the spectre of 1984, and I believe in hardcopy. I love the ability to look up text and link to it, but it's awfully hard to find out how things were from the tubes, compared to how they really are or were. And that is why I choose to be here now, to testify to why I support this man whom many people seem to find so strange. Perhaps the time is right, since Cheney asked me to.

"To my knowledge there was no direct threat. But there were conversations of concern."

    That is what I transcribed from FOX NEWS (channel 27 in my area) just now somewhere between 9:34 and 9:37 am Tuesday, June 5, 2007. Those were the words of the police chief on the phone, awaiting a press conference to explain why the students had been herded onto the football field and then sent home. Apparently two "non-student" "intruders" had been caught inside the school, and removed, so that "two unarmed suspects are in police custody." "To my knowledge there was no direct threat. But there were conversations of concern." "We decided to send the students home to give the police complete access to the school." AHA! I said to myself:  

   No, actually, please don't. In fact, in the end, what your local librarian really wants most is simply to get the books back. Borrow them? Return them. Thanks. (Most of our places even have drop boxes, so you can leave 'em there and call us up afterwards to explain if they were more than just a little late.) So why would something so patently obvious be a problem?
   As it turns out, it's not so much "our" problem as it is another example of entertainment media masquerading as news -hobos- "tramps", looking for an issue to hop on and see where it goes. As it happened, I was rudely awakened the other day, in one of those spit-your-coffee-at-the-screen moments, when I saw little Dudley-Tucker Library on WMUR TV. See what happened below: